[This guest post from Dr. Hannah Wakeford is a re-posting of her original blog piece, found at the Stellar Planet blog site...]

Over the years I have found that saying you are doing a PhD can be taken one of two ways by people; 'that sounds fancy you must be a genius or something' or simply 'why?'. The former are never trying to put you on a pedestal, and the later are not trying to get you on the defensive, but the dichotomy is sometimes difficult to deal with.

During the course of a PhD you are continuously finding out things that you, or anyone else, never knew before. That is the point, to present unique and new research at the end of it all. But this simultaneously puts you in the state of not knowing anything with impostor syndrome playing a big role in academia. No where does this become more evident to you than when you have to write it all up in your PhD thesis.

More than 500 astronomers and physicists have signed an open letter expressing our support for Sarah Gossan and Io Kleiser, and our thanks to them for their bravery in reporting the harassment they experienced as grad students at Caltech. The full list of signatories can be found in the read-only Google doc linked below. If anyone else would like to co-sign, details of how to do this can be found at the end of the file.

"A career in astronomy is a joy and a privilege, and one that we firmly believe should be open to all. Harassment and bullying force talent out of our field, and as such have no place in it.

Too often, the onus of reporting harassment falls on junior scientists, and we rely on their courage and fortitude to bring it to light. When this happens the rest of the scientific community has a responsibility to stand up and support them, quickly, visibly and vocally. And, as a general principle, if harassment has to cause someone to leave a collaboration or institution, the person who leaves should be the perpetrator and not the victim.

We want to offer our unqualified support and thanks to Sarah Gossan and Io Kleiser for their bravery and determination in reporting the harassment they have experienced as graduate students at Caltech. Our field is a better place for having women of this calibre in its midst. They belong. Harassment does not."

Back to top.4. Meet the Scientist Who Just Broke a Major Barrier for Black Women

From: Elysse Voyer [elysse.voyer_at_gmail.com]

by Esha Chhabra

There are 80 black female physicists in the U.S.-here's how one is succeeding.

Chemotherapy is notoriously hard on patients. It works by pumping powerful drugs into the body in hopes of killing the disease. To reduce the nasty side effects of cancer treatment, Hadiyah-Nicole Green, a 35-year-old physicist, wants to research using laser technology to kill cancer-and she just won $1.1 million to do it.

Green, an assistant professor at Tuskegee University, is the first woman to win the five-year grant geared toward nurturing black scientists from the Veterans Administration Research Scientist Training Program. She hopes to help change the perception of what black girls can aspire to.

This may come as a shock to you, but science has something of an issue with sexism.

I've written about this many times, and you can probably find a few hundred thousand more words about it elsewhere. The problems run a broad spectrum of issues, including pay, hiring practices, treatment of women in the lab/field/academic setting, publishing, the "leaky pipeline," and more.

Worse, these issues have a long, entrenched, historical precedent. Even when we talk about them we run into problems, like highlighting exceptional women who break barriers, instead of all the women who came before them and paved the way.

That's why I'm happy that Lady Science exists. As they say on their page, they are:

'a multifaceted collaborative writing project focused on women in science, technology, and medicine. Our purpose is to highlight women's lives and contributions to scientific fields, to critique representations of women in history and popular culture, and to provide an accessible and inclusive platform for writing about women on the web.'